I had full intention of posting a Wedgie that explored the depths of the post modern, consumerist driven, holiday known as Thanksgiving as defined by Canned vs. Homemade Cranberry Sauce but…..  Wedgie giver, Alex Soria, has asked an important question that I feel needs your attention today instead of existentially plumbing the depths of our retail driven society.

When you shower do you pick one: Use a washcloth with a bar of soap wedg.me/Td1bH6 or Use just a bar of soap wedg.me/WzG2wc

— Alex Soria (@youngbloodsoria) November 22, 2012

The Vice Presidential Debate of 2012 has come and gone. Truth be told, I wouldn’t even know who the Vice Presidential Candidates were if it weren’t for the Wedgies being made during the debate.  First up, The Shreveport Times asked their followers who was winning the debate. Some guy named Joe Biden, at least according to this statistically impure sample of Lousiana residents, was owning Paul Ryan.

Paul Ryan

Prompted by this Wedgie, I decided to find out a little more about these candidates.  Apparently Paul Ryan works for this guy named Mitt Romney. Mitt is a fan (or not, hard to tell) of PBS and managed to piss off not only 47% of Americans with some hidden camera remark, but also 53% of respondents to this USAToday poll. See how the USA Today has been using wedgies on their site.

Joe Biden

More investigation shows that you can’t actually vote for a Vice President. You have to vote for a President and he tells you who gets to be his right hand man. Sounds fair to me. We found this Wedgie hiding out in the archives, created by an anonymous coward. But if it’s true, it sounds like Joe Biden will be working for one sharply dressed man if Obama wins re-election.

Time to Vote

Now that you’ve been informed, will you be voting for Obama or Romney?

— Jimmy

Make your own Wedgies at http://wedgies.com

I’m from Vegas, but I found myself on a street corner in NYC early one morning with 40 other hackers and entrepreneurs. We were about to get on a bus sponsored by Twilio, Sendgrid and Microsoft to attend the Startup Festival in Montreal.  Nervous excitement crackled in the air as introductions were made, pitches and business cards were prematurely swapped and tweetable hashtags for the trip were discussed.

Jon Gottfried of Twilio gave us some great advice in his opening remarks as the bus started rolling. “The most cost effective way to market your startup is being friendly”.  You might be thinking, “Hey, I have friends. I’m a friendly person.”  But does your startup have friends?  Are there people who have no idea what you do but that talk about you and your co founders to everyone they meet?

While working on Wedgies, we’ve had the chance to make a lot of friends. And we’ve learned some important lessons about how to be a friendly startup and have seen it pay off in small and big ways.

1. Exchange Twitter Handles instead of Business Cards

The only reason to ever hand out a business card is to put it in the gold fish bowl at a Chinese buffet.  People leave these events with pockets full of cards and never remember who they belong to. With a Twitter handle you can continue engaging long after the event is over. Also, Twitter is great for making intros.

2. Make Friends with the Person Next to You

Waiting in a long line to meet a speaker or pitch a famous Angel? Turn around and start talking to the person next to you while you wait. You probably have more in common with them than you do with the person at the end of the line. And you have a better chance of finding someone cool to go to dinner with next to you than at the end of a line.

3. Don’t Pitch Your Product to People that Want to Help

We made this mistake at Startup Festival when we had an opportunity to ask Angel Investor Dan Martell some questions.

Dan: “How can I help?”

Me: “Well Wedgies is a simple….”

Dan: “No, I mean how can I help”

Porter: “We want to revolutionize….”

Dan: “Gentelmen, I want to help, what can I help you with?”

He wasn’t asking for our pitch. He didn’t want to be sold. But he has a wealth of knowledge and was willing to share it with us. All we had to do was ask him a question. And we did. And the conversation that followed blew our minds.  I’m glad he was patient with us.

4. Don’t Ditch Someone that Wants to Hang Out for Someone that Doesn’t

Spend an evening eating, drinking and conversing with new friends and you will be pleasantly surprised how you can help each other down the road.  Are you headed to dinner or drinks after a conference or event? Invite someone to go with. You can figure out the tab later.  

Be Yourself

Because you aren’t anyone else. Help other people and they will find ways to help you.  Or ice you.

Thank You!

Huge shout out to Twilio and SendGrid for putting together this event and sponsoring it. By far they are some of my favorite APIs to use and favorite people to hang out with. Feel free to hit either Porter or myself up on Twitter if you want to talk more about this, learn more about Vegas or just get some beers sometime.

Here is a list of all the groups that were on the bus. 

• ConnectCubed – Helps you get a job in the finance industry.
• CredoHealth – Private video chat between patients and health care professionals.
• FashionProject – Helping people donate clothes and earn money for non-profits.
• Fiestah – One-stop shop for party planning, including caterers and photographers.
• General Machines – Its Deatfel product hooks up the hard-of-hearing to others via phone.
• Gokrt – Online shopping cart for any site around the web.
• Kunvay – Easy way to transfer and receive ownership of creative work online.
• Review Trackers – Helps you monitor online reviews of your business or product.
• SlideSeed – SaaS that lets you create digital signage for you storefront.
• SplitWise – Helping you split your expenses smartly with friends and family.
• Tosigram – Making Terms of Service or Privacy Policy language easier to understand.
• Thryve – iPhone app that helps you eat healthier, not just count calories.
• Travtar – Travel search that compares hotels, hostels, short-term housing, and more.
• Wedgies – Simple online and SMS polling that can be spread via social media.

The 2nd half of the WCC Basketball Tourney Semi Championships saw something very peculiar happen. On the court, Gonzaga was easily keeping BYU at a distance score wise.  Off the court, Cougars and Zags were discussing their favorite spots to eat in their respective hometowns.  How did this come about?  120 seconds earlier, we gave the entire audience a Wedgie.

The WCC used Wedgies to poll and entertain the audience during the 16 games of their recent conference championship tournament.  The crowd responded via Twilio powered SMS and we gathered and condensed the answers into this infographic with the help of our good friends @grahamkahr and @andreviolante

If you were on a deserted island and you could only bring with you Pickles or String Cheese, what would it be?

Well that’s exactly what we asked Zappos employees at their recent All Hands Meeting. Except we didn’t ask them via Twitter - we put our real-time wedgie up on the projector screen and had audience members text in their vote. (For those of you wondering, we used the magic of twilio.com to power this wedgies feature.)

We asked the audience two other questions.

1. If they wanted to participate in the Downtown Project, an initiative to revitalize Downtown Las Vegas as the most community focused city in the world, and 
2. If the audience were given an empty shipping container Downtown, what would they do with it?

With the help of our good friends @grahamkahr and @andreviolante we’ve whipped together an infographic that correlates all three questions answered by Zappos employees. It’s a glaring look into the dark minds of pickle lovers and their honest friends, the string cheese fanatics.

(click the image for the jpg of the infographic)

If you want to use realtime wedgies in your presentation, e-mail me at porter@wedgi.es

Is this a @zappos All Hands or a @wedgies All Hands? ;)

— Crystal S Chang (@crystalschang) February 9, 2012

@ZapposInsights just sayin that wedgies are cool. @jimmyjacobson @wedgies

— Michelle T. (@chelle1014) February 9, 2012

Props to @jimmyjacobson! The live demonstration of @wedgies was out of control!

— Justin Heeren (@pseudopseudo) February 9, 2012